Landscape design software...

This shows the Bryce interface with a rendered demo scene illustrating the effects of lighting and atmosphere to simulate distance. For a larger view of the rendered scene (in a popup window), click HERE

Frankly, I am surprised to find that Bryce is still alive and kicking. In spite of the fact that it is probably the best known 3D landscape package, it has struggled in recent years to find a caring and loving owner. Having spent some lean years with Corel, it was acquired last year by DAZ Productions. This company has now dusted it down, tuned it up and provided a degree of integration with a new figure-posing and rendering application, DAZ|Studio. But is this too little, too late? Let’s take a look…

First, let’s take a look at the core features of Bryce. Ultimately, Bryce has one overriding purpose - to design and render photorealistic landscapes. This it does this fairly well. It may not do whole planets, like MojoWorld and it may not instant ecosystems of randomised forests like Vue, but for most terrains most of the time it does a decent job.

It can also do animation to allow you to fly through a landscape or animate skies, objects and textures and render them as movies. Animation in Bryce is, it has to be said, quite hard to do. Each animated element - a terrain, sky or material - has its own editor with its own animation timeline. So, for example, it you want to animate the growth of a mountain you would go into the terrain editor, drag a slider along the timeline, make a change to the terrain and click a button to add a keyframe. You would animate changes to skies and materials in a similar manner in their own editors.

Each editor temporarily replaces the default workspace and you have to exit the editor in order to get back to a view of the entire scene. The main workspace has its own animation slider which lets you preview the animations you have created in the various editors. You can animate objects in the main window and Bryce automatically smoothes out motion so that animated objects follow curving paths rather than jumping from point to point.

If you want to work with multiple timelines simultaneously you need to load up yet another editor - the Motion Lab. This displays timelines for animated objects, the sky, sun and so on (but not animated terrains, curiously enough). You can open out each timeline to display and edit particular attributes such as scale and rotation. This is the closet Bryce comes to a proper keyframed timeline editor. In my view it’s not close enough.

You aren't restricted to naturalism! This demo scene uses objects and materials to create a sci-fi scene

Landscapes and Trees

Landscapes in Bryce can include meadows, lakes, mountains and streams plus geometric shapes and ‘Boolean’ objects. A basic landscape is made by dropping a fractal terrain onto a scene and altering it, if required, in a dedicated editing environment. Here you can add height by painting with a mouse or pen. Various options let you erode a landscape or add mounds and spikes. You can also import greyscale pictures to create landscapes whose height maps are determined by shade density. This is one way of importing text for use as a 3D logo since Bryce does not directly support text.

The terrain editor is one of numerous specialised editors in Bryce. You can 'paint on' heights to create contours (see the preview, top-right) and select options to erode the terrain

Bryce does at least have a good range of primitives, You can drop in planes, cubes, spheres, pyramids and metaballs (which can ‘run’ together like blobs of oil, to crate smooth organic shapes). Unfortunately, the effects of metaballs upon each other are not shown in the wireframe view so you have to use quite a bit of guesswork with these!

Bryce also has a decent tree editor. You can click a button to drop a tree right into a landscape. Each tree is randomised to some extent to make sure that multiple instances of the same ‘species’ are not identical. The tree editor lets you choose ready-to-use trees from a list. These include a good variety of deciduous and evergreen varieties, some desert plants such as the Joshua Tree and a couple of palms. You can match and mix elements of different species by combining the trunk of one with the leaves of another; and you can alter the shapes, textures and density of branches and leaves in order to create new shapes or even entirely new species.

The TreeLab in Bryce lets you assemble trees from pre-defined branches, trunks and leaves and set parameters to change their shapes

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

If I were to pick out two things that set Bryce apart from the competition they would be: its price and its user interface. DAZ has sensible dropped the price to make Bryce appeal to users on a tight budget. At around $100 Bryce 5.5 is a low cost route into 3D landscape design. Though e-on Software’s  recent budget priced Vue Easel (at just $89) is a strong challenger.

As to its user interface…. well, what can I say? Those who like it probably love it. I am not among its admirers. In my opinion, the interface is wilfully bizarre. With its sculpted icons and 3D-effect panels, it may look nice in screenshots but, in use, it’s heavy going. There are just too many editors, too many icons and too little help. In fact, there is no context sensitive help at all. When you press F1 a PDF manual of more than 500 pages is loaded up and you are left to search for the relevant information.

Another thing which I dislike is the layout of the main workspace which only shows one view of the scene at a time. You can click icons to see alternative viewpoints but you can’t open multiple windows onto a single scene. In short, the Bryce interface is so unlike any normal application that a new user may not even have much of a clue as to where to start. This contrasts with Vue, which has a much cleaner interface with a readily accessible menu system and a traditional (for modelling and animation programs) four-pane view.

To be fair, there is a standard menu system available, too, but this looks as though it was bolted on as an afterthought. Most of the time the menus aren’t even visible. Only when you slide your mouse pointer up to the top edge of the monitor do they pop into view. In any case, the menus don’t give access to all of Bryce’s features so you are going to have to learn to use the default interface, like it or not. As you will have gathered, I don’t like Bryce's peculiar user interface; in my opinion, it simply makes no sense. In principle, the new DAZ|Studio is supposed to offer tight integration with Bryce. In practice, the two user interfaces are so unlike one another that you need to flip a mental switch when moving between them.

In summary, while I’m glad to know that Bryce has at last found a caring home with DAZ, the company will have to make far more substantial changes to the software before I will be tempted to use it in preference to Vue.

Huw Collingbourne

November 2005